Camerae Obscurae

Camera Obscura, Sarah Kofman, and Twilight of the Idols, Friedrich Nietzsche

I read both of these books for a course I’m currently taking that focuses on Kofman’s reading of Nietzsche and Freud. I had encountered the Kofman briefly, in another course, while I was already very familiar with TI. The Kofman is in the Will Straw translation, while the Nietzsche is Richard Polt’s translation for Hackett.

Kofman is a figure I hadn’t really encountered before the past few months, in large part because she doesn’t really have a huge reception history in english. She’s biographically fascinating, even from what little I know about her. She studied and kept up a correspondence over several decades with Derrida, wrote her thesis under Deleuze, worked with Hippolyte, and was intellectually engaged with all the major French thinkers of the mid-late 20th century. She wrote several autobiographical works, most famously one exploring the life and death of her father, a rabbi killed at Auschwitz. Much of her work centered around Nietzsche and Freud, especially the former, whose 150th birthday she chose as the date of her suicide. Derrida, eulogizing her, said that she had “pitilessly” read the two of them “inside and out… like no one else in this century.” I think that Camera Obscura suggests an intimate understanding of what Nietzsche was up to, which I can hopefully suggest to you with this rambling.

Ok, before I do that, I just want to talk for a second about how insane it is to assign TI in this context. While the course is a graduate seminar, it was not presented as requiring any advanced knowledge of Nietzsche; indeed, I know for a fact that several people enrolled had never read any Nietzsche firsthand before taking it. That means that the very first Nietzsche they read was Twilight of the Idols. Anyone who has read the book, or knows much about Nietzsche’s corpus, knows that this is like taking someone who says they’re interested in getting into Japanese film to see Ichi the Killer. Twilight of the Idols is insane. I have a friend who describes it as “late Nietzsche’s greatest hits”, which I think is apt, but that also means Nietzsche at his most shocking and cryptic. Within a few pages of the book’s beginning, Nietzsche has railed against the anti-Semites, made questionable comments about Judaism, and suggested that it is confusing for Russia to have songs because “evil people don’t have songs.” This book has the Nietzsche obsessed with the Greeks, the Nietzsche paranoid about castration, the Nietzsche fulminating against the falsity of causality, the Nietzsche who thinks Kant stands for everything wrong with Europe… it’s all here! I cannot imagine what it would be like to read this book as your first introduction to his thought, perhaps coming right out of a melancholy visit home. It would fuck me up. I can’t wait to hear, if I can, how those people reacted.

Camera Obscura is a book about a metaphor, divided into three chapters on Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche, with a postscript on Descartes. She begins with Marx’s claim in the German Ideology that “in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside down as in a camera obscura.” However, as Kofman points out, the idea that ideology is an inversion, that if one were to leave the camera obscura one could see right side up, cannot work for Marx. In GI, Marx plainly equates “what men say, imagine, conceive” wiht “ideological reflexes and echoes.” In the metaphor of the camera obscura, ideology is an inverted image. To fix it would be to set the image right side up – returning to the other side of the metaphor, to dispel the illusion of ideology and think of things as they really are. But our consciousness is not an ideological echo of “true consciousness”, but of material conditions – that is to say, not of some alternative set of thoughts, beliefs, etc. The naive binary of concealed/transparent or apparent/real cannot I think, be what Marx is looking for. I don’t want to make the lengthy defense which that claim would need, so I’ll just quote Kofman, who I think sums things up nicely.

The camera obscura is the unconscious of a class, of the dominant class which, in order to maintain its domination indefinitely, has an interest in hiding from itself the historical character of its domination, indeed all that is historical, the processes of genesis, the divisions of labor… indeed, difference itself. Thus, it would serve no purpose to lift the veil in order to make reality appear in its transparency; this would involve forgetting the possibility of hallucination, whether negative or positive, forgetting that transparency is itself a product of history and not something which precedes ideology.

The danger in the metaphor of the camera obscura is that one will fall into precisely that for which Marx excoriated Feuerbach: the naive belief that we might overcome illusion simply by contemplating it, with no attempt to change the real conditions out of which it is produced. Why, then, does Marx use this metaphor? I think Kofman doesn’t quite give Marx enough credit for what he’s doing here, but she does point out that this metaphor, alongside the arguments he provides and the other metaphors he uses, create a complexity in the text, what we could call a certain dialectical tension. Although she doesn’t make this explicit, I think Kofman is pointing in the direction of a really productive way to think about a pretty key question in the study of Marx: how is Marx positioned to write the critique that he does, given his bourgeois background? Even more than that: how can Marx be relevant outside of his limited context, on his own terms? It’s not that Marx was just so insightful that he could see past ideology. I think what Kofman is pointing to here is Marx’s attempt to complicate and destabilize the ideological-symbolic system within which he is forced to work. Marx knows intimately the impossibility of writing and thinking sui generis, but by creating tension in the conceptual metaphors he employs he can open up a path for critiquing the foundation on which he stands. Unfortunately, Kofman moves away from Marx (at least in this book) before exploring this line further. I won’t say much about her section on Freud, which is extremely interesting but would also make this too long. In any case, Kofman moves past Freud quickly so she can arrive at her real goal: Nietzsche.

For Kofman, the Nietzschean use of metaphors is the fully-matured version of the strategies of complication that she identified in Marx and Freud. (As I suggested earlier, I think this is a bit unfair: Nietzsche has the crutch of esotericism to lean on in a way that neither Marx and Freud do, having as they did much more concrete plans for what ought to be done with their thought. But that’s just an aside: she’s right nonetheless that Nietzsche is a master of this technique.) Kofman’s reading here is marvelous, if very French. I’ll stop summarizing soon, but her point is too interesting to pass up. She notes that Nietzsche discusses the camera obscura as a tool of the painter, a means for seeing nature clearly. This leads us to Leonardo, who modelled the eye using a small camera obscura. Her discussion of Leonardo ends with a really wild passage after she quotes Leonardo’s description of a cave, which I’ll reproduce here:

Wanting to know and to see; dreading, yet desiring to see. The menacing cavern, the fear of being engulfed within the belly of nature and yet the desire for the same. Nature, the mother, can be frightening. Darkness is not always a means for reaching transparency. After all, it stops one from seeing whether or not the mother has the penis.

Please note here that this is the first mention of the mother’s penis, and the first intrusion of the Freudian into the reading of Nietzsche. The quote continues:

Fetishism: might the camera obscura, as an instrument of transparency, not be that fetish which serves to deny the darkness of the other chamber and that which it conceals? Might it not be the substitute penis offered to the mother?

This passage is provocative, to say the least. To those who haven’t bought into Kofman by this point in the book, it most likely resembles many of the worst Freudian interpretive excesses. But the passage has a footnote: “This interpretation is not the only possible one. I acknowledge that Leonardo’s research is inscribed within the cultural field of the renaissance.” What is this footnote doing? She doesn’t offer some explanation of why she is justified in applying these psychoanalytic concepts transhistorically, she merely acknowledges (and, in fact, points out) that she is doing so! I think we should read this footnote as a wink. She knows that Freud’s metaphors will not fit perfectly onto her subject matter, and she applies them anyway. She draws attention to her own sin.

The remainder of Kofman’s discussion of Nietzsche becomes rather hard to talk about without lengthy citation, so I’ll take this as an opportunity to suggest my own link. This setting up of oneself as, in some sense, an “unreliable” philosophical guide is one of Nietzsche’s favorite moves. Nietzsche is always concerned with the illusion of objectivity created by a philosopher laying out doctrine, with the impossibility of achieving what he wants using the tools designated by Western philosophy as direct. There’s a quote from Laruelle’s Nietzsche contra Heidegger that comes to mind here, which I might be reproducing incorrectly because I’m freewriting this: “Nietzsche makes himself fascist the better to overcome fascism. He has taken on the worst forms of Mastery to become its Rebel.” I don’t know if I agree entirely, but there’s some truth here. Nietzsche is always taking on a position in order to undermine it, or criticizing a position in order to reveal that he himself is in it. He does this to his readers, too. I think anyone who spends a lot of time reading Nietzsche is familiar with his love for pulling the rug out from under his readers. Everywhere he tempts you into identification with some figure in his text, then shows that figure to be as hollow as the rest. Much of the time, reading Nietzsche is like watching him paint a landscape, detailed and vast, and inviting you to look more closely. And as you look around, and try to find the landscape’s borders, you realize that the two of you, you and Nietzsche, were not in front of the landscape but within it. Nietzsche’s well-known perspectivism poses the problem of self-criticism. How can you see yourself from a perspective that is not your own? I think much of Nietzsche’s work, in particular TI and Ecce Homo, should be read as an attempt to perform a new kind of self-criticism, one that does not invite the illusion of a view from nowhere.

I’ve read quite a few times that Nietzsche is always projecting. After all, doesn’t he bear an uncanny resemblance to the sort of figures he is always railing against? He describes his philosophical enemies as plagued with poor digestion, obsessed with books and antiquity, in poor health; this might seem a bit rich from the philologist with crippling migraines and violent indigestion. I think, however, that a close look suggests Nietzsche knows exactly what he is doing.

This is most easily seen (in TI) through the two sections “The Problem of Socrates” and “What I Owe to the Ancients”. The former purports to be an investigation of the historical position of Socrates, framed through Nietzsche’s proposed paradox: how was Socrates both repulsive and fascinating? What strikes me about this section, though, is that much Nietzsche’s diagnosis of Socrates could be applied to himself with equal accuracy. “Everything about him is exaggerated, buffo, a caricature; at the same time, everything is covert, reticent, subterranean.” I’d be hard-pressed to more succinctly summarize Nietzsche, right down to his beloved subterraneity. A few paragraphs later, we get this:

But Socrates surmised even more. He saw past his noble athenians; he grasped that his case, his idiosyncratic case, already wasn’t exceptional. The same kind of degeneration was silently preparing itself everywhere: the old Athens was coming to and end. –And Socrates understood that all the world had need of him–his means, his cure, his personal device for self-preservation . . . Everywhere, the instincts were in anarchy; everywhere, people were fivesteps away from excess […] When that physiognomist exposed to Socrates who he was, a cave full of all bad cravings, the great ironist allowed himself another word that gives us the key to him. “That’s true,” he said, “but I became the master of them all.”

The awareness that decline has already occured, understanding oneself as necessary, seeing the world as full of anarchic excess, the mastery of the drives: this is Nietzsche’s self-image, spelled out across his entire corpus and recapitulated here as diagnostic of Socrates. He must be read as criticizing himself simultaneously.

Contrast this with “What I Owe to the Ancients”, which makes explicit its self-referentiality in the title. For my purpose, this section is interesting because of what it omits. Socrates makes no appearance here, not even warranting a mention if one doesn’t count the few references to the “Socratic schools.” Why split these chapters at all? Sutured together they form one commentary on the Greeks. I think Nietzsche gives us a clue near the end of the section “What the Germans Are Missing,” when he claims that he is a “yes-saying type” who “deals in contradictions and criticism only indirectly, only unwillingly.” I think there’s a temptation to read this claim in one of two ways: either Nietzsche is joking or he is mad. Anyone who has read a page of Nietzsche knows that polemic is his natural terrain. In fact, few philosophers come to mind who are more capable of “contradictions and criticism.” So, he must either be joking with the reader or have such a lack of self-awareness that he can’t see the humor. The latter strikes me as unlikely, given that he writes this just two pages before beginning the section “Raids of an Untimely Man”, made up entirely of attacks on his perennial enemies. But writing his claim off as “just a joke” strikes me as similarly mistaken. Nietzsche is fascinated with the possibility of thinking lightheartedly, with the idea of a profound joke, with “joyful wisdom.”

This joke is also a clue: Nietzsche is telling us that his criticism is indirect. It cannot aim straight at its target. At first this seems like nonsense: what possible target is Nietzsche unable to strike directly? In TI alone his targets range from ancient philosophers to French historians to entire religions and eras of history. Any group left out of TI gets their fair share in the rest of his corpus. The answer is staring us in the face: the only person he cannot face directly is himself. The Problem of Socrates cannot possibly be included in What I Owe to the Ancients, because to do so would make his criticism of himself too explicit, chained to the “I” of the latter’s title.

I have no conclusions here; describing what Nietzsche wants to do with this covert project of self-criticism and self-undermining is beyond me. I do want to end, though, by thinking about the book’s subtitle: “How to Philosophize with a Hammer.” Nietzsche gives us at least one gloss on what this could mean in the foreword, when he describes his project as one of “sounding out idols.” When struck with a hammer, we imagine, these idols will reverbrate and reveal by the sounding their (hollow) inner nature. But look closer: Nietzsche says that these idols are “touched here with the hammer as with a tuning fork.” Now, as Nietzsche must have known, the distinctive feature of a tuning fork is this: no matter where you strike it, the sound produced is at the tuning fork’s own resonant frequency. Sounding idols out with a tuning fork will only ever tell you about the fork. Twilight of the Idols is full of targets being struck; from these, Nietzsche tells us, we might finally understand that which strikes.